Las Vegas home prices rise, report shows, but Phoenix ranks first

Home prices kept growing at a slower pace locally and nationally in July, but Las Vegas still outpaced most big cities, a new report shows.

Southern Nevada prices were up 4.7 percent year-over-year in July, compared with 3.2 percent nationally, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index released Tuesday by S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Phoenix had the fastest price growth among the 20 markets in the report for the second consecutive month, fetching a 5.8 percent gain.

Las Vegas’ growth was No. 2 for the second straight month, following a yearlong reign at the top of the Case-Shiller list.

In Southern Nevada, home prices aren’t climbing nearly as fast as they were last year, builders are selling fewer houses, and the region’s once-shrunken tally of available listings on the resale market has climbed back.

The median sales price of previously owned single-family homes — the bulk of the market — was $305,000 last month, up 3.4 percent from a year earlier, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.

By comparison, in August 2018 the median sales price was up 13.5 percent from a year earlier, the GLVAR previously reported.

Las Vegas prices have been on a “roller coaster” over the past 15 years or so, soaring through the mid-2000s bubble, plunging during the Great Recession and then “ramping back up” since 2012, GLVAR President Janet Carpenter, of Signature Real Estate Group, said in a statement earlier this month.

“If you look at it that way,” she added, “I guess you can say we’re coasting along right now.”

Nationally, prices continued to show year-over-year gains in July “but at ever more modest rates,” Philip Murphy, global head of index governance at S&P Dow Jones, said in a statement Tuesday.

In July 2018, for instance, U.S. prices were up 6 percent from a year earlier.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.